Chris Cooper & Marianne Leone: Becoming Actors

We’re digressing here from our ongoing conversations about higher education in general, and arts education in particular. For the perspective of experience and solid accomplishment, we’re asking two acting professionals in the middle of enviable careers what they learned in and out of school, where they’d be looking for training, how much they’d pay, if they were starting out again. Chris Cooper is a Hollywood hero, often in deep supporting roles. He won an Academy Award for one of them, in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. His wife Marianne Leone played the gangster mama Joanne Moltisanti in The Sopranos on HBO.